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Like his other two dramas, I’ll Follow Your Down wrestles with ethical issues, while in terms of style and tone, it veers radically from those better works.

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An eccentric millionaire’s strange way of searching for an honest man is central in Mehta’s superb debut, Amal. Siddharth explores the plight of parents of a child reluctantly sent hundreds of kilometres away to be a labourer and who is now missing.

Haley Joel Osment stars as Erol, a young man trying to find out what happened to his father in I'll Follow You Down.

In turning away from New Delhi — where these two films were set — to Toronto (played by Hamilton) for I’ll Follow Your Down, writer-director Mehta is still mulling over morality. But this time he moves to sci-fi to consider morality and time travel.

I’ll Follow You Down may also be the first time some moviegoers have seen another example of a kind of time travel: the change in former child actor Haley Joel Osment. He’s gone from big-eyed dead people-spotting moppet in The Sixth Sense (1999) to a bearded and slightly chubby 26-year-old.

Here, he plays Erol, a downbeat physics protégé, the son and grandson of similar egghead stock.

Young Erol reluctantly says an airport goodbye to his father and chess-playing pal Gabe (Dark City star Rufus Sewell) as he leaves for a weekend conference at Princeton. But when he and mom Marika (The X Files’ Gillian Anderson, effectively low-key) return to scoop dad after his trip, he never appears.

Phone calls go unanswered and puzzlement and frustration lead to worry as hours pass with no word from Gabe. Marika’s Princeton physics professor father and Gabe’s mentor, Sal (Canadian stalwart Victor Garber) heads to the hotel to find no trace of his son-in-law. Gabe’s phone and wallet are still in his room.

Twelve years later, stoic Marika tells herself Gabe is dead, although she does a lot of self-medicating to dull the pain of not knowing what really happened to her husband. Sal has moved to Toronto to teach so he can keep an eye on Marika. That means his star pupil is now Erol, who tries to balance looking after his sad mom with keeping girlfriend Grace (Susanna Fournier of TV’s Being Human) happy.

Sal’s increasing worry about Marika’s fragile emotional health makes him confide in Erol that he knows more about what Gabe was doing in Princeton than he let on.

He has Gabe’s notes and floats the theory that he was actually there to work on a time travel device that would send him back to the same weekend in 1946 to talk theories about his invention with Albert Einstein.

Erol is slow to be convinced. There’s talk of wormholes and events that change time amid scenes of Erol and Sal working at chalkboards as they try to complete key formulae — complete with frustrated chalk tossing and papers furiously swept off tables in clichéd scenes.

Erol theorizes something happened to trap his father in 1946. He struggles with the idea of going back in time, saving him and ultimately others who suffered because of his loss. But that bumps against the moral obligation to not mess with the rest of world. There were lives lived over the past 12 years that would also be altered, a dilemma made even more urgent by news from Suzanne.

Ponderous in spots and not as smoothly crafted as it could be, I’ll Follow You Down is also held back by Osment’s performance, which never seems comfortable or convincing, despite solid bookending from Anderson and Garber.

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